“You put the place off limits,” said the Colonel. “Good. I like a sealed environment.”
“I hope my Sovrintendente extended you every courtesy during your search,” said Blume.
“Oh, he did his best to stop us,” said Farinelli. He let out a cloud of smoke and nodded from inside it. “But what could he do? The magistrate tried to send him away, but he wouldn’t budge. He even insisted on watching us as we gathered evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“Why paintings, of course. That’s why I have been called in. Art fraud is my special area.”
“Murder is mine.”
“Yes. I’m sure you’ll have a murder to look into sometime soon. What’s the average in your district, two, three a month?”
“Are you saying Treacy was not murdered?” said Blume. “Do you have evidence for that?”
“Of course not. That’s up to you, Commissioner. It should be clear within a few hours, or tomorrow after the autopsy, no? Meanwhile, I’m looking after this.” The Colonel tossed his cigar butt out the door. His suit began to ripple as he began the process of heaving himself across the seat toward the door.
Blume walked away in the direction of Grattapaglia, leaving the task of pulling his boss out of the car to the Maresciallo.
“You did try to stop them, right?” said Blume as he reached Grattapaglia.
“Stop a team of Carabinieri, a colonel, and a magistrate with a search warrant? I did my best.”
“OK, OK. I should have answered when you called. Get back to the station now.”
Grattapaglia nodded over Blume’s shoulder. “Here they are again. And I can see Inspector Mattiola looking a bit lost at the end of the street.”
“Take her back with you.”
“So it’s all working out? She’s a big help?”
“Get lost. Write that report on this morning’s incident.”
Grattapaglia moved away, leaving Blume face-to-face with Colonel Farinelli who was holding two solid white boxes with “Franchi” written on them in blue cursive letters. He caught Blume’s glance and raised the boxes slightly. “A break for lunch, Commissioner. That’s where I was just now. Do you like Franchi’s take-out fare?”
Blume did-who didn’t? But he said nothing.
Blume pushed open the green door, which now sagged on its hinges, and stepped into the narrow passageway, imagining the Colonel trapped there like a hog in a rabbit hole.
“I did not enjoy squeezing in there last time,” said the Colonel. “If you’d be so kind…” He handed the boxes to Blume.
Blume handed them back, saying, “Get your Maresciallo to carry them.”
“Ah, but he’s staying here.”
“Then carry them yourself.”
By the time he reached the door to the greenhouse, the Colonel was breathing heavily and had difficulty ascending the two steps that led inside.
When he had finally made it up, he put down the boxes and placed his hands on the small of his back and pushed his stomach out even further, like he was considering buying the property.
After a while, with his breathing back to normal, the Colonel said, “Treacy has hardly changed this place.”
“Treacy?” said Blume. “You knew him?”
“Of course. I knew him well. Or used to. This house must have been the servants’ quarters for Villa Corsini.”
Blume went through the kitchen and into the next room. The walls were now almost bare, though several paintings had been left. The unframed sketches and paintings he had noticed earlier piled on the desk were gone, and the papers on the desk had been thoroughly searched and many of them lay scattered on the floor. Perhaps the utility bills and bank statements were not vital evidence, but they could be useful, and Blume had intended to take them in. Yet Farinelli and his men had thrown them on the floor. The only reason Blume could see for that was that they had been looking for something else, something specific.
Colonel Farinelli appeared from the kitchen. “What are you looking for? You’re not conducting an investigation, you know.”
“I’m curious,” said Blume.
“What we have here is a natural death. No need for your squadra mobile. The dead man was a forger, hence my involvement,” said the Colonel. “But I seem to remember, you don’t work well with the Carabinieri.”
“Usually I work fine with the Carabinieri,” said Blume. “Last time I didn’t, Buoncompagno was directing that investigation, too. I just want to see a few things for myself before I sign off.”
“Come into the kitchen, then,” said the Colonel.
Blume returned to the kitchen, where the Colonel had thrown open the fridge.
“You’re an Anglo-Saxon,” he declared. “So I suppose you’re more butter, beer, and milk than wine, oil, and water?”
Blume did not reply, but the Colonel was not waiting either. “Your northern diet is very high in cholesterol. You need to be careful.” He pushed the refrigerator door shut. “What did you see in there that might be interesting?”
“A lot of eggs,” said Blume.
“Ah, you noticed them, did you?” said the Colonel, clumping his hands together. He wore a large ruby ring on his middle finger.
“Yes,” said Blume. “And I thought maybe he was using the eggs for tempera painting, instead of just eating them.”
The Colonel tapped the side of his nose. “What made you think of that?”
“I’m investigating the suspicious death of a man who forged paintings for a living. Eggs are used for tempera painting, it’s an obvious connection.”
“It’s not obvious to everyone,” said the Colonel, pulling out a green folding wooden chair from below the marble table on which the two boxes now sat beside a honey pot, a bag of sugar, an open carton of milk, a pepper canister, and a bottle of Worcester sauce. “But I suppose you have the right background.”
The Colonel lifted the flimsy chair in one hand, looked at it scornfully, then put it down, and dragged a heavy oak stool with paint spots all over it. He brushed the surface with the back of his hand, sat down, stretched out his arm, and pulled the two white boxes across the table. “Your parents were art historians, Commissioner. I was hoping some of their knowledge had rubbed off on you, and it seems it has.”
“Did you delve deep, Colonel?”
“A cursory glance, just to see who I would be dealing with. I am very impressed, Commissioner. Really. That was a terrible thing that befell your parents. What made you decide to stay in this awful country afterwards?”
Blume wagged his index finger at the Colonel, warning him off the subject.
“I don’t mean to intrude on your private grief,” said the Colonel. “Though it can’t have been easy. All these years on a police salary? We public servants, risking our lives, grossly underpaid, unrewarded, unrecognized. Policemen fall into arrears on a mortgage, take stupid risks, some even kill themselves out of despair. Some have killed their families. It doesn’t take much to get into a hole, especially if the first place you go to is the criminal underworld instead of your colleagues in law enforcement. A house sale falls through, your kid needs braces, some bastard sues you for some trivial mishap. And there we stand, vulnerable, outbid, underpaid, in debt.”
He opened a box with a sigh and a sad shake of his head that caused his cheeks to wobble. “Get those two glasses over there, the ones by the sink, would you?”
Blume stayed where he was.
“Go on,” said the Colonel. “I had them washed earlier. The corkscrew, too, if you’d be so kind. And some knives, forks, spoons from that drawer.”
Blume spread his hands out in an apologetic way, and said: “Sorry, Colonel. You want a valet, call your Maresciallo in.”
The Colonel sighed theatrically. “Look, Commissioner, I am a fat man. What is simple for you is difficult for me. I suffer from diabetes. I have gout in my left toe.”
“Gout? Nobody gets gout anymore.”
“Nowadays they call it metabolic arthritis. It’s been getting worse. It comes in the spring, stays for the summer, and is gone by the winter. Like some sort of evil migrating bird.”
Blume went over and retrieved the glasses, corkscrew, and silverware, brought them back to the table.
“To the side of the refrigerator there, in the rack, the bottle third from the top-no, the other. That’s it,” said the Colonel.
Blume brought the bottle of wine over, set it in front of the Colonel who was now lifting things out of one white box.
“The thing is,” said the Colonel, “our man was not known for forging tempera paintings, and I found only two in the house. His real specialty was pen, ink, wash, sketches, preparations for prints. He was a great draftsman, but maybe his eye for color was not so good. Maybe you need to be Italian to appreciate the full palette of color.”
“Do you?” said Blume. “Well, then maybe he just liked eggs a lot.”
“There was a lot of milk in that refrigerator, too,” said the Colonel. “Both fresh and sour. Anglo-Saxons always have so much milk.”
“The fresh milk tells us Treacy was here recently,” said Blume. “Not that it’s likely to make much difference.”
“Why would he keep sour milk, Commissioner?”
“Milk is used as a fixative for pencil and chalk, which is what you say he mainly used. Sour is as good as fresh for that. Or maybe he made his own soda bread.”
“Soda bread? Good stuff that. You use sour milk? You must tell me about that another time,” said the Colonel. “Speaking of bread, did you notice the basket with the stale bread in it?”
Blume went over to a wicker basket sitting on the counter, pushed off the top, and produced two pieces of broken dirty bread which he rapped against the counter.
“Rub breadcrumbs over a chalk drawing, and you get an old look,” said the Colonel. “Treacy was a bit of a pig, but I don’t think he kept dirty bread to eat.”
“It’s hardly the only way to get a drawing to look old,” said Blume.
“You’re right again,” said the Colonel. “Just one of many techniques.”
“So maybe it was just stale bread,” said Blume.
“What else did you notice?” asked the Colonel.
“There was gelatin in the fridge, which maybe he used for glues or for preparing paper, something like that.”
“I see garlic, potatoes, vinegar. They can all be used, too, can’t they?”
The Colonel had dipped his spoon into the pot on the table. He twirled it niftily between his fingers as he pulled it out, opened his mouth, and dropped in a glob of honey.
“Honey is used for pastels,” said the Colonel, his voice slow and thick.
“Vinegar, wine, oatmeal,” said Blume. “There is an ice-cube tray full of ink over there, and it looks like he used the pastry-board as a drawing board. Under the sink in the greenhouse, I found denatured alcohol, white spirit, benzene, turps. You can smell the turps in here. Also, he was doing something with oils in that double boiler.”
“You haven’t missed a trick,” said the Colonel.
“Yes, I have,” said Blume. He walked over to the zinc fruit bowls and scooped up a handful of small acorns, shook them in the hollow of his hand, then let them drop. “Why did he collect dry acorns?” He went to the other bowl and picked up the woody fruits he had examined earlier. “And I don’t even know what these are.”
“Oak apples,” said the Colonel. “Or galls.”
“Galls?”
“Houses for insect larvae.”
“Sorry. I still don’t get it,” said Blume.
“I don’t know much about the nature side of it,” said the Colonel. “These things grow on oaks, maybe on other trees, too. They contain wasp larvae. What you do is pluck them, dry them out in the oven or the sun, then crush them with a pestle; you mix in acorns, too. But I don’t know what the proportion is. You mix it with water, maybe other things, and you get iron ink for drawing.”
“And that’s the end result in the ice-cube tray?” said Blume.
“You don’t use your nose enough, Commissioner. Bring your face down to that ink, breathe in, slowly, use your mouth as well as your nose. Open the back of your throat, too. Get the taste.”
Blume put his face over the tray and sniffed. “Nothing,” he said. “Maybe a bit like a sweaty cheese rind.”
“You need to learn to use all your five senses, Commissioner, and never despise smell which is our most basic, our most reptile sense. That is not gall ink. That’s cuttlefish ink. You can smell the salt. Damn, I can taste it in the back of my throat from here. Wonderful stuff. It looks black, draws brown. But gall-it burns through paper, but that’s good if all the paper you have available is half ruined. Gives you an excuse for all the wear.”
The Colonel pointed to the raised brick fireplace where a half-burned log lay in ash. “It’s too warm to be lighting fires for comfort,” he said. “So we can assume that had another purpose. Mix the soot with rainwater and you’ve got bistre which, in the end, is going to be the ink he used most.”
“Does it have to be rainwater?” asked Blume.
“Definitely. Especially here in Rome. Too much limescale in the tap water, too many salts in the bottled stuff. Besides, it’s free. You know who used bistre a lot?”
“Who?”
“Nicolas Poussin,” said the Colonel. “And you know when I first met Henry Treacy?”
“Tell me.”
“In 1973, when he was accused of trying to sell a fake Poussin landscape. An oil painting. He wasn’t so good with oils. Good, but not that good.”
Blume did some mental arithmetic.
“I turn sixty-three on November 13, Commissioner. That’s what you’re trying to work out. Two years ago I moved out of the Carabiniere Art Forgery and Heritage Division in Trastevere and was posted to Madonna del Riposo.”
The Colonel picked up a flat painting knife from the table, stabbed it into the top of the second box, and slit it open. He pulled out several flat and several bulky packages and a half loaf of Genzano bread, then set about unfolding and unwrapping each package. The flat ones contained salamis and cured hams, the bulky ones cheese.
The Colonel broke off a triangle of cheese and popped it into his mouth. He shoved the corkscrew into the black bottle before handing it to Blume. “If you’d be so kind, I’m a little breathless?”
Blume pulled out the cork, handed the bottle to the Colonel, who filled up Blume’s glass. Blume pushed his glass back to the Colonel, and said, “No thanks.”
“But it’s a Sassicaia. Not the famous 1985 vintage, more’s the pity, but even so.”
“I do not drink,” said Blume.
The Colonel held the glass by the stem and lifted it up so that the ruby highlights in the dark wine became apparent. “I see,” he said. “And this is because you are an alcoholic?”
“No. I just thought I should give it up, that’s all,” said Blume. “I prefer to keep in shape.”
The Colonel placed his nostrils over the rim and inhaled, sipped the wine, paused, pursed his lips, then drained half the glass. “You must be an alcoholic. There is no other reason for not drinking Tuscan wine. I’m disappointed, but I am sure we can still manage to work together. Informally.”
He unwrapped a bundle of waxed paper to reveal a pile of sliced ham. He peeled off the top slice with his thick fingers. “This culatello is particularly sweet. Try it.”
Blume hesitated, before finally helping himself to a thin slice of meat. It was good.
The Colonel cut a wedge of yellow cheese with a black rind, handed it to Blume, and said, “Gran Bastardo.”
“Who?”
“The cheese. That’s what it’s called. Comes from the Veneto,” said the Colonel. “By the way, if you insist on treating this as murder, just remember that Treacy’s business partner John Nightingale is the one with the most to gain and the most to lose. Most to gain because maybe he knows where Treacy has hidden his wealth and is now about to help himself, but most to lose because he may have just killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. You know, I can’t bear to see you sitting there drinking nothing. There’s some mineral water in the fridge, help yourself.”
“I don’t drink mineral water. Tap water is fine.”
The Colonel tore at a hunk of bread. “You’re not eating. Here.” He pushed over a plastic carton with soft white cheese. “Testa del Morto. Lovely on the bread. Slide a slice of ham over the top, fold, and.. ”
“No thanks.”
“Fine. More for me, then.” The Colonel chewed for a while, then started fingering around in his mouth. “Always get these strands of flesh… stuck between my teeth. I don’t suppose you have any toothpicks on you?”
Colonel Farinelli eventually decided the solution to the annoyance in his mouth was to down another glass of wine.
“As I said, I knew Treacy very well, once. I also knew his business partner John Nightingale, though less well. The two of them came to my attention in the 1970s.”
The Colonel pushed away his plate, and continued, “Henry Treacy and John Nightingale were a very effective pair. Treacy specialized in sixteenth-century forgeries. He used to say no artist after 1620 was worth imitating.”
“In America, we’re taught that’s when history starts,” said Blume.
“Sounds to me like Treacy was right,” said the Colonel. “No, I mustn’t do that.”
“What?”
“Scoff at other cultures. Especially the Americans. They are the new Romans. Practical, murderous, and efficient. Now I know you insist on being taken for an Italian, but you must admit, it’s a strange thing for us Italians to have foreign names in law enforcement, though for some reason we have had a number of half-foreign magistrates, hundreds of half-breed journalists.”
“I met three Filipino recruits, recently,” said Blume. “Plenty of Croats and Serbs in the force, too. And some German names. It’s not as rare as all that.”
“I am not happy with these developments, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Maybe you can tell from my face how fascinated I am by your views on race, Colonel?”
“You need to learn how to give conversations time to mature and expand, Commissioner. Let people have their say, allow them their little foibles and foolish beliefs. Don’t always be so direct. No one will want to talk to you or confess to you. All this directness, which, if you don’t mind my revisiting the idea, is terribly American, is not conducive to trust. You’re an isolated man, Commissioner. Learn how to tune into others’ wavelength. We need to be talking, getting to know one another. So I don’t like niggers on TV reading me the local news about my ancient city of Rome, what do you care? You listen, silently disagree, we talk. That’s how it’s done.”
Blume shoved himself and his chair back from the table. “If you have something important to say, then do me a favor and start at the end with whatever the important thing is.”
“And talk backwards thereafter? Absolutely not. Anyhow, you’re still investigating. I can tell from the way your eyes keep roaming around this room, looking for things. So I know you’ll be interested in what I already know about Nightingale and Treacy. But before I go any further, did you happen to find any manuscripts, typescripts, memoirs, notebooks, diaries, papers, when you were here earlier?”
“No,” said Blume.
“Written in English, possibly? Probably in longhand: I don’t think Treacy would have even recognized a computer.”
“No.”
“That’s unfortunate. Have you spoken to Nightingale yet?”
“No,” said Blume. “I’m here with you, waiting for you to tell me something.”
“Replicating a picture or doing it in the style of an old master is not a crime, but, of course, you know that. The crime comes when it is offered for sale as if authentic, but Treacy never sold the paintings. That was Nightingale.”
“Did Nightingale do time?”
“No,” said the Colonel. “And I’m glad we’re talking like civilized men now. Treacy was caught with faked provenance documents a few times, but he could pretend he was an innocent victim. As for the sale price, Nightingale always feigned a total lack of artistic sensibility. He would ask the buyer to name a price, sometimes even warning about the possibility of forgeries. He allowed buyers to call in experts, if they wanted. If they came back to him and told him it was a fake, which usually they didn’t, you know what he would do?”
“Withdraw it from sale?”
“No. He’d apologize, and ask them if they were interested in buying it as a copy or a pastiche instead. Often they said yes, and the painting would go out with just the surname but not the Christian name of the artist, which is the convention used for imitations. The important thing is, it remains legal. Art forgery, dealing, even theft and ownership-all categories that are hard to pin down. Legally speaking, art is a very gray subject.”
Without warning, Colonel Orazio Farinelli’s face turned the color of a damson plum. It was not until beads of sweat appeared on his forehead that Blume realized what he had taken for an expression of inexplicable rage was the result of the Colonel’s efforts to stand up. When the Colonel had made it off his stool, he placed his hands on the table, lowered his head like a penitent until his face and head returned to white. Then he spoke.
“You are absolutely sure you didn’t find a manuscript, a diary, anything like that? Or, if you prefer, I could shorten the conversation and ask you where you put the one you found.”
Blume opened his hands like a priest blessing the broken bread on the table, then he, too, stood up. “I found nothing of the kind. But I am interested in your insistence on these papers. Perhaps we should look for them together?”
The Colonel said nothing, but walked back into Treacy’s living room, where he eased himself into a leather armchair.
Blume cleared some art books off the bulging settee, and settled himself on it, and looked over to where the paintings and sketches had been.
“I see you have been removing things from here.”
“True,” said the Colonel. “As you can see, I’ve left that painting with the seaport, classical ruins, ships on the wall. Take it down, pop it out of its frame, have a close look at it.”
Blume was interested enough in where this was leading to do the Colonel’s bidding. He unhooked the painting, and immediately checked the back where he saw a monogram made up of the letters “HRTR,” with the “T” done like a tower.
“I like the way you checked immediately for a signature on the back,” said the Colonel. “There’s one on the painting itself if you look closely. Anyhow, HRTR stands for Henry Treacy. That’s his mark, so he was not going to sell that as an original. Now tell me, does it look like it could have been painted three hundred and thirty years ago?”
“I don’t know. The colors are dark. The paint is cracked everywhere. Thousands of tiny squares.”
“How does it smell?”
Blume made a skeptical face, but brought his nose down to the canvas. “Dusty, woody, a little sweet. It smells old,” he said. “It’s very glossy and hard to see this close.”
“And seeing as you’re that close, can you see any wormholes?”
“Yes,” said Blume. “Quite a few, now.”
“Look just inside the rim of one of the wormholes. What do you see?”
“I see nothing. What am I looking for?”
“Ink or paint.”
Blume moved his head back slightly, and realized he could see the canvas better. Was that the first sign of needing old-man reading glasses?
“I see no ink inside the holes.”
“Of course not. If the painting is genuine, there could be none, since the wormholes are supposed to come after the composition, so how would color get into them unless it was false-new paint on old canvas, see?”
“Yes.”
“And yet, convincing though this may seem, it wasn’t good enough for him to market. He liked it enough to sign it. Maybe he used it to show what he could do. Personally, I think he darkened the tone too far. Treacy ran the most incredible risks. His whole left cheek was wrinkled and scarred from burns he gave himself back in the ’80s from boiling oil. He tried to create black oil to darken a painting, and mixed it with mastic varnish. Knowing him, he probably did it next to cans of turps and benzene, too.”
“Yes. He had a beard that covered most of the scars.”
“He grew a beard? My, my,” said the Colonel. “It really has been some time since I saw him. I can’t picture him with a beard. Always so vain. He even thought his scar was romantic.”
Blume looked at the back of the canvas again. “It’s got faded stamps, mildew, even some old netting or something, like it came from somewhere else. It’s convincing.”
“Yet this is one of his rejects,” said the Colonel. “I don’t suppose you’d be so kind as to pass me that bowl…”
Blume passed a bowl of fruit to the Colonel, who plucked out an apple and bit it in half. “Floury, old. A still-life apple,” he said. “Disgusting.” He finished it with four more bites and balanced the core on the arm of his chair. “Let me tell you what made Henry Treacy special. He had no artistic personality. I don’t mean in real life. He had too much in real life. But when it came to painting, he had no personality at all.”
The Colonel picked up and tossed the core of his apple toward the fireplace. It missed and came to rest beside the bookshelf, just below the gap left by the removal of two marbled notebooks. The Colonel did not speak for a moment, and Blume felt sure he must be staring at the same empty spot. Then he heard a grunt and a crunch, as the Colonel helped himself to another apple and bit into it.
Keeping his movements leisurely, Blume withdrew his gaze from the empty slot on the shelves, and said, “Is no personality a good or a bad thing?”
“For a forger, it’s good.” The Colonel took another bite, and swallowed without chewing. “To know without being known.” He finished the apple and this time dropped the core back into the bowl, then casually fingered a leopard-skin banana. “To know without being known,” he repeated. “It’s a good philosophy for policemen and for serious artists, as well as for forgers. It’s the opposite for politicians and junk celebrities. They want to be known without knowing.”
“And Treacy?”
“I think he began to be attracted by notoriety. So he began to want to be known, which is suicidal if you’re a forger.”
“Suicidal or the sort of thing that can get you killed?” asked Blume.
“Good point. What you don’t want is notoriety or personality. You do not want people to be able to point at a work and say: That’s a Treacy.”
“So he adopted the personality of the painter he was copying?” said Blume.
“Not the personality. What I mean is he didn’t let his own come through. You’re an American, so you must have been brought up watching Westerns, right?”
“Westerns are more your generation, Colonel. I was more into Starsky and Hutch.”
“What’s that?”
“ Kojak, you’ve heard of Kojak?”
“Yes,” said the Colonel.
“Well, Starsky and Hutch were… Never mind. They were nothing like Kojak. Rockford Files? Harry O? ”
The Colonel was shaking his head impatiently.
“ Hawaii Five-0. Jesus, I loved that,” said Blume. He thought of Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, turning around to look straight at the camera, those three strands of hair out of place, an effect that he used to try and imitate in front of the mirror. Jack Lord had a scar on his face, too, come to think of it. He brought his attention back to the Colonel. “You were saying something about Westerns.”
“Westerns are always set in the 1880s or 1890s,” said the Colonel.
“Well, you’re the expert,” said Blume. “But the American Old West goes back at least to the Gold Rush, which was 1848.”
“I’m not interested in that now,” said the Colonel.
“First you start talking about Westerns, now you’re not interested.”
“You are being obtuse, Commissioner.” The Colonel took the banana, peeled it, and examined the fruit and nodded in approval. He pressed half the banana into his mouth, paused, then spoke.
“When you watch a Western, you can always tell when it was made. They try to dress like it was the nineteenth century, but you can clearly see the styles of the 1940s or ’50s or ’60s in the clothes, in the makeup, the hairstyles. And that’s not even counting the colors used in the print. It takes, what, about five seconds for you to recognize the decade in which the film was made, even without seeing an actor. The personality of the period comes through.”
“True,” said Blume.
“And yet the directors at the time were usually trying to make things look as nineteenth century as possible.” He ate the second half of the banana. “It’s the same thing with forgers. You keep looking at one of their works, and you get a feel for when it was really painted, not when it was supposed to be. Naturally, this makes it easier to spot forgeries from the past, from the 1940s or 1950s, say. Forgeries made now are harder to spot, not because they’re better, but because we are incapable of seeing the style of our own time. We’re too close. We watch a Western made in the last few years, it looks more accurate than the ones made in the 1950s. That’s the beauty of Henry Treacy’s work. It doesn’t have a strong personality. Nothing comes through. He’s timeless.”
The Colonel put the banana skin on the table, struggled, and rose from his chair and walked over to the davenport desk. He opened a drawer that Blume had completely missed earlier and pulled out a rolled-up piece of paper, and, holding it reverently, showed it to Blume. “Beautiful buff paper, but machine-made, so no attempt at passing it off as authentic, but look at the skill.”
Blume saw a yellow and gray image of a woman looking down at her foot.
“This is where he excelled. This is what he sold. Of course he used paper from the period.”
“Where did he get it?”
“All sort of places. Fly leaves in old books, old paintings or drawings. Old sketchbooks. You saw that Latin missal in the kitchen? That would have made a good source of paper. What do you think it is?”
“A woman hitching up her dress, turning out her foot-it looks unfinished,” said Blume. “He didn’t do her other foot.”
“What we do is we search through the paintings of Raphael, Bronzino, Parmigianino, or Annibale Carracci.”
“We?”
“You and I. Let me finish, Commissioner. If we find this woman, or a woman in this pose, or something that reminds us strongly of it, then we would market this work here as a preparatory sketch by the artist. Seventy thousand euros, minus handling expenses and assuming a good outcome after examination by experts. That works out at maybe twenty thousand for you, thirty for me. And that’s just this one. Of course, maybe it won’t work out so well.”
“You just said it was on modern paper and not salable.”
“Quite right. This one here is worth almost nothing. But then he did another just like it. On proper paper. My men removed it earlier. And there are eight more forgeries. I would need to look at them closely to make sure they are marketable, but at first glance I was impressed. More than you, obviously, since you left them here with an aggressive and none-too-bright junior officer guarding the scene.”
The Colonel pulled a fat aluminum cigar case from his breast pocket. He unsheathed the cigar, sliced the end with a silver cutter, then, with plenty of cheek-puffing and grunts, got it alight. When he had surrounded himself in sweet blue smoke, he said: “Well, are we working together or not?”
Blume decided to allow the question to hang in the air with the cigar smoke while he worked out a strategy.
“Well?” insisted the Colonel.
Blume parried with a question of his own. “What about Treacy’s partner, John Nightingale? He must know about the paintings in here.”
“A good practical question,” said the Colonel, lowering himself back into the seat. “But Nightingale almost certainly knows nothing about these. They did not get on very well. Clash of personalities or nationalities or something along those lines. One reason they had the gallery was to maintain a neutral space where they could meet. Treacy told me that once. I don’t think Nightingale was ever in this house.”
“You know a lot, Colonel. So you must also know how they worked together. Logic suggests that Nightingale must have known what Treacy was preparing. To organize things ahead of time.”
“Logic maybe,” said the Colonel. “But that is not how it worked at all. Like so many Anglo-Saxon fraudsters, they considered themselves essentially upright men forced to compromise with Mediterranean reality. Not only did Treacy not say what he was preparing, I know for a fact that he never even told Nightingale he was making fakes. I had this from both of them, and though I struggled to believe it at first, I think it was true. They liked to pretend that Treacy had somehow come across a valuable painting or, as an alternative, that he had created a pastiche on period canvas and then forgotten to mention this incidental detail to Nightingale. Nightingale always said he could pass a lie-detector test if he had to. It was always possible that Treacy was finding genuine old masters and passing them on.”
“Really?” said Blume.
The Colonel smiled behind the swirls of smoke. “Of course not. But good liars tell themselves lies over and over until they believe them. Treacy specialized in ‘finding’ the plausibly overlooked. Nightingale built up provenance stories.”
“Wouldn’t Treacy have wanted some real works to copy from and study now and again?”
“I imagine so. It is possible one of these is real. It’s a world of bluff and double-bluff, and almost nobody ever gets caught. It’s also as close to victimless crime as it’s possible to get.”
“Aren’t the people who buy forgeries victims?” asked Blume.
The Colonel looked slowly to the left, to the right, and then to the left again. He did this a few more times until Blume finally realized that he was shaking his head in ponderous disagreement.
“Do you feel…” the Colonel hesitated, looking for a term, “ sympathy for someone who spends a few million on a painting, which they never even learn is false?”
He allowed himself a silent pause as he continued smoking his cigar, making the occasional appreciative popping sound with his lips. He let the ash fall on the arm of the chair, and when the cigar was finally down to a glowing stub, he started on the elaborate sequence of grunts and movements that indicated he was preparing to stand up again. When he finally succeeded, he seemed to fill the room with bulk and smoke as he moved around in search of an ashtray.
“Over there,” said Blume, pointing to a lump of heavy crystal on the mantelpiece, but the Colonel allowed the cigar to drop onto the stone flagging on the floor and trod on it.
“Too far,” he said.
The smell of the stubbed cigar was like bad breath. The Colonel picked up an orange from the fruit bowl and began peeling it, dropping the thick skin in slabs on the floor beside the cigar. He divided the orange into four segments and ate three before finally saying, “Let me tell you about a clever trick Treacy and Nightingale liked to work. Treacy would do a damned fine work, usually a small portrait, that looked like it might be a-oh, say a Colberti portrait from his period in Italy, then overpaint it with a poor-quality forgery, usually copied directly from an existing work by someone pretty well known-Van Dyck, say.”
“I’ve never heard of Colberti,” said Blume.
“That’s because I just made up the name,” said the Colonel, and popped the quarter orange into his mouth. “Interesting you should spot that.” He winced slightly as if the orange was bitter. “It means you know more about art than you are letting on.”
“All I said was I had never heard of him,” said Blume.
“You were puzzled by an invented name, Commissioner.” The Colonel wiped some juice from his lips with the back of his hand. “Now let me finish. Let’s say Dosso Dossi instead of the non-existent Colberti. Better?”
“Stop testing and get back to telling, Colonel.”
“Well said, Commissioner. Nightingale would place the easily-spotted Van Dyck fake on the market. When a buyer came forward, he would ask him if he was absolutely sure he wanted the work. Affecting great probity, he would sometimes confidentially reveal to the buyer that he had some suspicions about the authenticity of the work. This served three purposes. The first was to cover himself from liability or any possible setup by us. The second was to insure the buyer examined the painting carefully, including what was under it. Once the buyer looked below the surface and found what he thought was an original by an old master hidden beneath, then he would buy the painting at whatever the asking price was and would usually insist that it had passed all his tests for authenticity. Clever, eh?”
“You said three purposes,” said Blume. “Coverage from liability, persuading the buyer to look below the surface to get to the ‘real’ fake below, and the third?”
“Amusement. Delight,” said the Colonel. “The glee of watching people get trapped by their own greed.”
“And are you immune from the same risk?”
“No. Are you?”
Blume was saved from replying by his phone ringing. He answered it without looking at who was calling, and felt a slight lift as he heard Kristin’s voice.
“Alec, that was an interesting name you gave us. Are you alone?”
“No. I’m sitting right in front of him now.”
The Colonel nodded approvingly. “Getting some background on me? Good work.”
“And now he knows I’m talking about him,” Blume said.
Kristin hesitated, then said, “I’ll call you back.”
“No, tell me now. There must be something interesting that made you call back so soon.”
“He’s ex-secret service. SISDE as it was then. One of the bad apples from the barrels and barrels of bad apples Italy has been producing for years,” said Kristin. “ Deviato as the press likes to say. He’s supposed to be retired. Also he was involved in an interesting way in the investigations into the Moro murder. In a way that involved this embassy. But that’s all I’m telling you on the phone.”
“Is that your romantic way of confirming dinner this evening?”
Kristin paused before replying. “Yes. We need to talk. You were joking when you said he was sitting in front of you, weren’t you?”
“Of course I was,” said Blume.
“Alec, you need to be careful of this guy. He used to be at the center of a lot of stuff.”
“Used to, but isn’t now?”
“Not now, but he’ll still have connections. Don’t let him know you’re on to him.”
Blume hung up, danced his fingers back and forth on the armrest as he considered Kristin’s warning, then said to the Colonel, “So I hear you were in SISDE.”
“I see you have your sources,” said the Colonel. “Can I ask who they are?”
“I’m sure you can find out if you’re all that interested,” said Blume.
“I am interested. But as you have found out this detail, which I was going to tell you about anyhow, I can get straight to the point. Treacy may have written a diary or some notebooks that contain some compromising details, I won’t call them facts, regarding activities from a long time ago.”
“How long ago?” asked Blume.
“Long, long ago. 1978. There used to be a bar on Via Avicenna in the Marconi district. It was a hangout for monarchists, nationalists, patriots, activists. One regular customer was a certain Tony Chichiarelli. He, too, was a forger. He got killed in 1984. Along with his son, who was a few months old. Now Tony Chichiarelli had a good friend called Luciano Dal Bello, and you may come across this name if you decide to start delving into my past, which I really hope you won’t feel the need to do.”
The Colonel paused to allow Blume the opportunity to make a promise. When he did not, he continued, “Dal Bello was a criminal, but he was also an important informer, and I was his contact. Now, another person who used to hang out in that bar was Henry Treacy, who we all called Harry. He was also Chichiarelli’s friend. I don’t know if they worked together as forgers. It doesn’t seem likely, since Chichiarelli specialized in handwriting, signatures, checks, false share certificates, all that sort of stuff. But they knew each other. Chichiarelli knew Nightingale, too. Now, does the year 1978 mean anything to you?”
“Argentina won the World Cup. Crystal Gale and the Bee Gees were in the charts. It was the year of Disco Inferno,” said Blume.
“In its proper place, there is nothing better than bantering good humor,” said the Colonel.
“That wasn’t just to annoy you, Colonel. Those were the things that were important to me then. You may remember it as the year Prime Minister Moro was kidnapped, then executed by the Red Brigades in March. Me, I was a kid in another country. Come to think of it, I probably didn’t even know about Argentina and the World Cup. I’d have picked that up later. I know the name Chichiarelli. From books and police reports, not experience. He was involved in mysterious ways in the disinformation campaign. Didn’t he produce false messages from the Red Brigades, and from that poor bastard?”
“Which poor bastard?” asked the Colonel.
“Aldo Moro,” said Blume.
“Ah, him. Yes. That’s the sort of thing Chichiarelli did. Not under my instructions, of course.”
After a few moments, Blume said, “Well?”
“Well what, Commissioner?”
“I’m waiting for the end of your story.”
“There isn’t an end. Not a proper one.”
“If you handled Chichiarelli, you must know quite a lot about what really happened in the Moro case.”
“No one knows anything,” said the Colonel. “There are too many centers of power, none of which trusts the other, and too many transversal operators like Chichiarelli. Apart from me and a few others, most of the people from then are now dead-or in Parliament, of course. Now Treacy’s dead, too. I just need to see what he wrote. You are quite sure you found no notebooks or diaries or anything of the sort?”
Blume shook his head. He did so with vigor and relish, but felt he might have overplayed it.
“It would be a bad idea to lie to me,” said the Colonel. “Especially now that we are negotiating a possible joint venture that, let me remind you, involves no victims, no loss to the taxpayer, and no betrayal of colleagues. Let’s say the person who would be most upset at the idea of fruitful collaboration without his knowledge is Buoncompagno.”
“I could live with that,” admitted Blume.
“Good. Also because certain works, smallish, easy enough to transport, have been removed from this house and, I regret, not logged properly. It as if they never existed, or as if they were here when you arrived, and vanished during the search you and your inspector carried out. If they were to appear on the market and, say, Buoncompagno were to get a tip-off, and then the records show that the works were never logged by us or you, but you were in here first without a magistrate giving oversight, well then, unjust though it would be…”
“I understand,” said Blume. “That will do.”
“Excellent, so we have a deal?”
Blume remained silent.
“I am going to interpret that as a reluctant and principled yes,” said the Colonel. “Now, I hate to insist, but, in my capacity as your temporary business partner, I find it odd that you’re not interested in finding out more about Treacy’s papers.”
“That’s funny,” said Blume. “Because I was just about to ask you, in my capacity as a permanent policeman, how you are so certain they exist.”
“A word of warning,” said the Colonel, sitting forward in his seat. His drooping eyelids gave a soft and tired expression to his face, but, as Blume now saw, he had the eyes of a younger man, and his gaze was sharp and unremitting. Blume stared back, assuming a look of mild interest, waiting for the Colonel to deliver his warning.
“Nobody interrogates me. Is that clear?” said the Colonel. “Nobody. I will not be questioned.” He allowed his eyelids to close for a moment, and his voice took on a more jovial tone. “At least not before lunch. Perhaps you will join me?”
Blume stood up.
“It’s too early for me, Colonel. But I wish you luck in your hunt for these papers.”
“Thank you, though I am pessimistic. We shall be in touch soon, you understand that?”
“I look forward to it,” said Blume.